Photograph by: Paramount Pictures
, Postmedia News

Want to drive your son crazy? Buy him two shirts, and when he wears one, say, “What’s the matter? You didn’t like the other one?” — Old joke.

Ah yes, the interfering mother, or, more to the point, the Jewish mother. Where would stand-up comedy be without her? Stop me if you’ve heard this one: a nice, studious boy with limited social skills, no girlfriend, and a degree in chemical engineering goes on a week-long road trip with his mother, a yenta with a heart of gold. The result is 95 minutes of mildly entertaining schmaltz called The Guilt Trip, a sort of Thelma and Louise with a bar mitzvah.

The nice boy is Andy, played by Seth Rogen with that croak of matter-of-fact incredulity that helped ground the reality in several Judd Apatow projects. Rogen is a likable foil who thrives on understated outrage, but The Guilt Trip is more interested in reconciliation: it goes for “warmth” rather than “being funny.”

Nevertheless, he is a persuasive son of Joyce, played by Barbra Streisand with comic timing that falls just this side of aggravation: she’s a mother who phones her son several times a day to check whether he wants her to buy him some slacks from the Gap, monitors his water intake (she fills water bottles from the tap; why waste money?), and isn’t averse to discussing the problems she discovered with his penis when he was an infant. The fact that she does this in a strip club does nothing to make her lower her voice.

Andy is a failed genius — my son the loner — who has invented a great household-cleansing product. Unfortunately, he can’t sell it, mostly because of his awkward, boring, scientific sales pitch that has prospective buyers walking out the door almost from the moment he begins.

He’s about to head off on a cross-country jaunt, a last-ditch effort at success, and he invites his mom to come along. He does this for reasons that are typically warm-hearted: he has learned that his widowed mother had an old flame from her teenage years, and he has tracked the man down in San Francisco. Maybe he can reintroduce her to the life she abandoned when her husband died many years before.

Screenwriter Dan Fogelman (the Cars movies, Crazy, Stupid, Love) is like Apatow without the claws, and The Guilt Trip is more reassuring than edgy. For instance, when they get into the car, Joyce wants to listen to a book on tape of Middlesex, the novel about a hermaphrodite whose several references to sex are embarrassing for Andy to hear in the company of his mother. Apatow, you suspect, would have had them listening to 50 Shades of Grey.

The Guilt Trip doesn’t identify these people by ethnicity (their family name is Brewster) but it’s apparent that this is an extended Jewish mother joke. As such, it’s anodyne but comfortable, and Rogen and Streisand form an amiable bond, allowing for the way she sticks her nose into every aspect of his life. It’s just part of the film’s affectionate look at the mother who loves too much, a type familiar from a thousand stand-up routines and a hundred novels. “She spends half her life up my ass as it is, checking the manufacture of my stool,” said the hero of Philip Roth’s 1969 novel Portnoy’s Complaint.

That mother was a kind of psychological monster, but Joyce has been reduced to something kinder, a thrifty, obsessive but not altogether unaware woman who, unfortunately, just can’t shut up. During the film’s big blow-up scene — which is later defused with welcome maturity — Andy tells his mother to mind her own business. She replies, “I don’t know what to say,” and he says, “Finally.”

The road trip meanders from spot to spot, carried on the blunted edge of chemistry that Rogen and Streisand provide. Director Anne Fletcher (27 Dresses) softens their antagonisms into something forgivable — the soundtrack lights up several times with the yearning of violins — and eventually we realize that there’s not much at stake here at all. Andy and Joyce really don’t have any problem with one another, at least nothing that couldn’t be solved if he could just sell some cleanser.

CAPSULE — The Guilt Trip: A mild-mannered comedy with Seth Rogen as a man who invents a great household cleanser he can’t sell and Barbra Streisand as his interfering mother. They wind up going on a road trip together, which results in some anodyne misunderstandings. The humour is predictable, but the leads have a nice chemistry that is entertaining. 2 1/2 stars out of 5

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